Rio will know the best man always wins

Fabio Capello had hoped to make a belated attempt to let Rio Ferdinand down gently at Old Trafford on Tuesday night, but the bottom line is that elite sport is a meritocracy and, as bruising as it may be, the best man gets the job.

That is how life will have panned out for Ferdinand, indeed for all professional footballers, since school days. While he might be hurting right now, the idea that the manager picks the best man and the rest have to suck it up and move on will not be new to him.

The moment a boy steps through the door at a professional football club the competition is brutal. There will have been thousands of times when the straightforward principles of natural selection have ruled Ferdinand’s life: when he has passed a trial and a friend has not, or been awarded a new contract while others were let go.

Simply being picked ahead of another player each Saturday afternoon is testament to football single-mindedness. Ferdinand gets in because his manager decrees he is better.

There will also come times when the boot is on the other foot and Ferdinand may not like it but he will have to accept it, just as he accepted losing the captaincy of Manchester United to Nemanja Vidic.

Absent leader: Ferdinand at the World Cup

The succession of injuries he has suffered is not his fault, but it is not the fault of Capello, either. The England manager may have reached the same conclusion — that John Terry is the natural leader of this England team — anyway, but Ferdinand’s frequent absences put the thought at the forefront of his mind, rather than making it a nagging message from the recesses.

Sir Alex Ferguson wrestled with the same issue before conceding that his best captain was not the player that he made the most expensive defender in the world at £30million, but his humbler, leonine team-mate Vidic.

Ultimately, Capello believes this is about picking the best man, too, and when he has reached a decision, as Terry discovered last year, he is utterly ruthless.

‘I am old,’ he said on Monday, when asked to explain why he had been so cold in his determination to axe Terry as England captain. Just as he would be expected to be remorseless in his choice of a right back or goalkeeper — no worries about bruised egos there, just name the name and get him out there — he feels the captaincy should go to the finest candidate.

That was Terry, until Capello decided the gathering chaos made him a point of weakness. So he sacked him.

Now the drama has subsided and, having had a look at the competition, Capello wants his first choice back. This is football’s meritocracy at work. He is not concluding that Ferdinand, or Steven Gerrard or even Frank Lampard, were bad captains. Merely that Terry is a better one. And he is old, so has little time for smoothing paths or sugar-coating the reality.

We have heard a lot about the senior players being made restless or angry at the latest development, but this ignores the fact that Capello’s England are re-grouping under a banner of youth for the European Championship in 2012, and the remnants of the famous golden generation are gradually becoming a minority.

Think of England in 12 months’ time and it is possible Jack Wilshere, Andy Carroll, Theo Walcott, Joe Hart, James Milner, Adam Johnson or Ashley Young could be players of significance. Wayne Rooney and Glen Johnson are young enough to be placed in that bracket, too.

If Wilshere plays, either Lampard or Gareth Barry will be sacrificed. There is no guarantee Ferdinand will be a regular, given his current struggle. Terry aside, it could leave Gerrard and Ashley Cole as the only survivors of this senior party. The dynamic of the group is changing. Looking at the performances of Michael Dawson for Tottenham Hotspur in Europe this season, even fit, might Ferdinand’s position not be under threat?

A vox pop of squad members has been taken by the England management apparently, but not in a crass way that asks the individual who he would want as England captain. And not the players that might expect to be consulted, either.

The younger and newer arrivals have been drawn into conversations about the welcome they received on joining up, which players made them feel part of the group, who took time out to include them, who encouraged them, who stayed in touch when the squad returned to the clubs.

It is understood that Terry scored very highly on key elements such as aftercare service. Capello’s belief that 95 per cent of the players see Terry as captain is thought to be a result of these inquiries.

Service with a smile: Terry welcomed new members into the England fold

There is a player at Manchester United that some claim is the most naturally gifted to come through their academy in modern times.

Ravel Morrison is 18 and recently answered to two charges of intimidating a witness. He could have been sent to a young offenders’ institution after subjecting the victim of a knife-point robbery to a two-day ordeal to stop him giving evidence against two friends.

Morrison was most likely spared because Manchester United vowed to stand by him through his rehabilitation, although there have also been signs of a reckless attitude to his professional responsibilities, too.

Yet he continues to progress through the purity of meritocracy.

It would be a perfect world if every talented boy came ready formed and reliable, but life is not like that. Football, however, does not always care for social niceties, just as it does not see race or religion. It goes with the best, and that is what Capello is doing.

Ferdinand may not like it, and he certainly won’t agree, but it is the way it has always been.

City expose UEFA flaws

There can never truly be such a thing as financial fair play and Manchester City are about to prove it.

To comply with the upcoming changes in UEFA regulations, the club are looking to strike a naming rights deal over the City of Manchester Stadium. This could prove very lucrative and will help to balance the books when set against recent transfer expenditure.

Yet the very reason Manchester City are in a strong position to negotiate is because Sheik Mansour has invested part of his personal fortune in creating a club that should contend for the Champions League next season.

So, City have disregarded all the principles of financial fair play to get where they are and, in doing so, contrived to abide by it.

It is an old, old story. Every elite club in Europe have at some time spent money they did not have to achieve success and grow; but City’s balancing act exposes the inconsistencies and limitations of the system.

In the future, rivals must attempt to compete with the present elite, while governed by restrictions that limit the investment that built the biggest clubs.

Before the arrival of the present owners, a naming-rights deal for Manchester City’s ground would have been worth substantially less.

The same would be true of Chelsea and Stamford Bridge, where Roman Abramovich is also believed to be considering selling naming rights to make his sums add up. Financial fair play will draw an arbitrary line on an arbitrary date and turn a blind eye to the shenanigans that went before.

Manchester City are in just before UEFA pull up football’s drawbridge; it really is that random.

Big personality: Lehmann

Captaincy being the theme of the week, the lack of a true leader at faltering Arsenal cannot go unnoticed.

The club has won nothing under Arsene Wenger since the days of Tony Adams and then Patrick Vieira, and the move for Jens Lehmann as emergency goalkeeping cover smacks of a manager desperate for strong personalities.

As Lehmann’s previous concept of leadership involved a somewhat spectacular fall-out with team-mate Manuel Almunia however, one cannot help but think that, not for the first time, Wenger is barking up the wrong tree.

With Manchester United and some of the biggest clubs in continental Europe already circling like sharks, Harry Redknapp insists he is not worried that his best players will be picked off if Tottenham Hotspur fail to qualify for the Champions League next season.

‘Gareth Bale and Luka Modric came to us when we were not in the competition,’ he said, quite reasonably. Sadly, as Harry well knows, football isn’t like that. Tottenham’s players have got the taste of the big time now and the old rules no longer apply.

How to lose fans and alienate people — just look at rugby

There are, apparently, five good reasons why Wales’s winning Six Nations try against Ireland should not have stood on Saturday, most of them too mind-numbingly dull to document here.

The main ones can be located in Law 19, section two, clause C.

‘For a quick throw-in the player must use the ball that went into touch. A quick throw-in is not permitted if another person has touched the ball apart from the player throwing it in.’

Yet there is also an unanswered question covering these regulations. Why?

Why should it matter what ball returns to play, providing it has the right amount of air in it? Why should it matter whether the kicker, a ball boy or a member of the crowd does the fetching, as would happen in the amateur game? Why is it so wrong to benefit the attacking team? Why is it a crime to wish to speed the game up? And why does rugby union, of all sports, take this almost perverse delight in wishing to be the slowest-moving sport of its type in the world?

I asked the excellent Stuart Barnes, international fly-half turned broadcaster, about this at Twickenham on Sunday.

He had plenty of time to answer. The game between England and Scotland, scheduled to last 80 minutes, went substantially closer to 120 by the time stoppages were taken into account.

The injury to Scotland No 8 Kelly Brown accounted for some of that, but much of it was the usual stuff that delays rugby: milling around, having a row, staring with lips pursed at H-shaped posts before summoning sufficient composure to kick the damn ball, and forming an orderly queue for a line-out.

There is a most extraordinary capacity for time-wasting in rugby, compared to equivalent sports such as hockey or football. Even cricket gets more of a shift on when the state of the game dictates.

But Barnes couldn’t answer my question either. He has long advocated giving a kicker 30 seconds between placing the ball and planting it between the sticks.

Sacrilege, say the purists. If a penalty had less chance of being successfully converted, the percentages would begin to reward foul play.

This is a fair point, but it does not explain what is so wrong about throwing the ball back into play as quickly as possible, to better benefit a running game.

Barnes said that recently he was at home flicking channels between a rugby match involving Exeter Chiefs and a football match featuring Arsenal. Barnes is an Arsenal supporter and was torn between professional duty and partisan loyalty. He decided to catch excerpts of Arsenal during breaks in play at Sandy Park.

It soon became noticeable how much of the Arsenal game he was able to see. Worse, when he got engrossed in the football and decided to switch back to the rugby, he was surprised how often play had not moved on at all. The players were still shuffling around in preparation for a scrum or a line-out, or a kicker was still weighing up the challenge of the posts.

The action at the football was relentless, meanwhile, with players anxious to restart. By contrast, rugby staggers to its conclusion weighed down by five reasons why the ball cannot be recycled without as good as being signed off in triplicate.

The irony is that, at the Rugby World Cup, the presence of minnows enduring horrendous mismatches is explained by the desire to promote and expand the sport around the world.

Bringing in rules that make the game more attractive to watch — like rugby did with the ‘tap and go’ kick, which actually gets play moving again quicker than a free-kick in football — would surely help.

Nobody wishes union to become more like rugby league in its slavish devotion to constant movement, but finding the odd way to get the ball back in play without everybody having time to knock off for a cup of tea or phone home is surely not an affront to the principles of the sport.

Rugby tinkers with new rules — the dreaded Experimental Law Variations — probably more than most sports, yet too many ELV’s serve only to make the game ever more complex and impenetrable.

It reminds of the years in which David Blunkett was Home Secretary. New crime prevention legislation was passed so furiously that lawyers began to lose interest in acquainting themselves with the changes; they would just wait for the next lot.

The best recent rule update in any sport is field hockey’s embrace of the self-pass from what were previously free-hits.

Football could learn from hockey. Imagine a free-kick where the kicker, instead of needing to pass to a team-mate to restart the game, also has the option of putting the ball down and running with no opponent in a five-yard radius allowed to block him or make a tackle.

The self-pass is quicker, offers better advantage to the attacking team and kills all dissent, because a defender would be mad to attempt arguing with an official when an opponent could be running on goal.

Rugby, meanwhile, will continue finding 50 ways not to achieve the point of the game: all the time wondering why the sport is not more popular.